Harvest Moon: Magical Melody UKReview

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We dig deep to discover whether Harvest Moon's first Wii outing is still the best in its field.

By Keza MacDonald

If you're an FPS-addicted, explosion-hungry player dependant on adrenaline, headshots and ever-bigger guns for your thrills, then Magical Melody self-evidently isn't for you. As far as I'm concerned though, the Harvest Moon series is one of the best things in gaming. Nothing else in the medium provides the same calm, simple happiness of tending to your own little virtual patch of land, stroking your polygonal livestock or waiting for the turnips to sprout while you slowly accumulate enough money to buy a mayonnaise maker. It's a charming, gentle - and almost utterly unique - series of farming RPGs, sitting alone and serenely oblivious in a world full of grey games about shooting and death.

Magical Melody was originally released for the GameCube back in 2006, but never made it to Europe. However, despite its two-year heritage, it remains a near-essential purchase for players with a hankering for the simple life and still the best game in the Harvest Moon cannon. It's an utterly addictive, loveable RPG that's bigger, better and more varied than Friends of Mineral Town, A Wonderful Life or any other title in the series. After three game-years of play, you'll have still barely scratched the surface - with hundreds of social events, a huge cast of characters and an enormous selection of different items, tools, crops and furniture to discover. Not to mention the usual farming, fishing, mining, cooking and animal-rearing that makes up day-to-day life.

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Magical Melody has the same delicate and addictive balance of hard work and reward that's always defined Harvest Moon, but it differs in that it offers a much greater element of choice. Rather than being lumbered with some forgotten relative's run-down dump of a farm on the outskirts of town, you can choose from three plots of land in amongst your neighbours. From there, you go about tilling, planting seeds and earning money as usual, slowly saving enough for a chicken coop, barn, bigger house or ludicrously expensive island getaway – or, if you're more frivolous, some nicer furniture.

There's a much greater sense of social involvement in Magical Melody than other Harvest Moon titles. Rather than being a pariah with only cows and plants for company, chatting to neighbours and supporting local businesses influences the town around you, causing new people to move in and set up their own shops (bringing hot new spouse fodder with them). They're not the best conversationalists in the world – villagers tend to offer only one or two sentences of chat – but they are likeable, bobble-headed in style and have their own distinct looks and personalities.

Harvest Moon: a plump pillow for your weary gaming brain.

Magical Melody also fares better than its siblings thanks to the inclusion of clearer objectives and less abstract goals, helping make Harvest Moon's expansiveness less intimidating to newcomers. Completing little tasks – everything from buying a chicken to staying out in the rain for eight hours – earns you musical notes, which are like little achievement points and make exploring Harvest Moon's vast wealth of Things To Do even more enticing. There's also an androgynous, poncho-wearing rival farmer called Jamie, who provides yet another incentive to transform your farm into a tomato-and-pineapple production empire with an army of cows and a pet pig.

Magical Melody presents all of this challenge, choice and longevity in a brilliantly adorable manner. Cows wear perfect, blissfully stupid expressions, and your neighbours are as distinctly loveable as the town is idyllic - all rivers and flowers and lazy afternoons spent fishing or holed up in the village pub as the sun goes down. Undeniably though, the untouched GameCube graphical simplicity makes proceedings look somewhat dated and, though the style is great, it'll never win awards for its looks. Sound effects, too, are a tad basic and music is repetitive - with cheerily infectious tunes treading a dangerous line between the brilliant and utterly infuriating.

This is actually a GameCube screenshot. Not that you'd really know the difference.

It's hard to gripe too much about a game as great as this but the lack of any significant Wii-specific upgrades comes across as lazy, if not just plain cynical. While we can forgive the lack of an audio-visual overhaul, a little bit more effort in the control department would have been much appreciated on Wii. Remote control elements consist entirely of swinging to use an axe, hammer, sickle or fishing rod, and though it provides a passable simulation of actual physical labour, it's imprecise and far from enjoyable. It's a good thing you can use buttons instead, or it really could get trying.

Even more disappointingly, the GameCube original's option to play as a girl has been entirely removed for this release, leaving female fans unable to take their pick of the original version's 11 eligible bachelors. Essentially, this European Wii title offers one half the game Americans have enjoyed for two years, with nothing significant to compensate the other half's absence. Rising Star officially explains this hack job as follows: "The development team decided that implementing the option to play as both boy and girl within this specific title would not offer any additional gameplay elements and may have resulted in a delay to the release of the title". Of course, it's tough not to raise an eyebrow when you consider how long it's taken Magical Melody to reach Europe – or scoff at claims of development "priority […] on delivering exceptional gameplay" when looking at just how much remains untouched, including numerous in-game references to the GameCube controller.

The Verdict

Yes, Rising Star deserves a punch on the nose and a slap on the wrist for some risible development decisions, most of which appear to show little love for this fine series. As it is, though, Magical Melody is still a tough title to stay angry with for long. It's soothing, compulsive and peculiarly thrilling all at once: a perfect little world where working hard brings its own tangible rewards and cows have huge happy faces. Even in this slightly butchered state, it's good to see Magical Melody finally on these shores. If you're of a more action-orientated persuasion, a fan of the GameCube original or a member of the fairer sex, you might have cause for complaint - otherwise, off you go, and enjoy the greatest game so far in a superb series.